So What? Marketing Analytics and Insights Live
airs every Thursday at 1 pm EST.
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In this week’s episode of So What? we focus on what we learned over the past year of Weekly Livestreams. We walk through what we feel as worked, what we can do better, and what we hope for the next year. Catch the replay here:
In this episode you’ll learn:
- Ups and downs of live streaming
- How to measure the impact of a live stream
- What’d we’d do differently if we were starting over
Upcoming Episodes:
- TBD
Have a question or topic you’d like to see us cover? Reach out here: https://www.trustinsights.ai/insights/so-what-the-marketing-analytics-and-insights-show/
AI-Generated Transcript:
Katie Robbert 0:45
Well hey, Happy Thursday. Welcome to so what the marketing analytics and insights live show, in this very special edition It is our one year anniversary of doing so what our livestream and as all of the peloton instructors like to say an anniversary is just a celebration of consistency. And in this case it is because we have consistently, you know, barring all of us being wrapped up in something else, we have consistently been doing this show every Thursday at 1pm, Eastern on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, you know, you name it, and then sharing it as a blog content the following Friday morning. So what I want to do today is cover sort of our lessons learned from doing this show for a year. Because each of us is going to have a different perspective of what the experience has been like. So Chris, you want to kick us off?
Christopher Penn 1:41
I’m actually gonna suggest since you are the our fearless leader that you kick us off, but some of the things that you’ve seen us do well and do poorly
Katie Robbert 1:50
fearful leader. No, you know, it’s, it’s interesting, um, it’s not. It sounds like it would just be easy, like, okay, just set up a camera and go, but I’m naturally very introverted. And so, for me week after week, having to sit in front of a camera knowing that, you know, even if it’s just a handful of people, a handful of people are going to see me, you know, having to get over that. For whether it’s this or public speaking or whatever it is, for me has been a lesson to learn. And so it’s funny whenever I see, you know, the calls to action have come camera ready, that the camera ready call to action, always preed some sort of level of anxiety of like, I have to have like, full makeup in my hair done. And really, people aren’t coming for that people are coming for the information like, yeah, I should probably look like I’ve showered and put on clean clothes. But they’re really more so coming for Yeah, even then it’s a little sketchy. They’re really coming for the information. And so for me, it’s almost been a lesson in letting go of that idea of having to be perfect all the time of like, fully, fully put together, like everything in its place. And those kinds of things like, Yeah, I don’t want to present myself slovenly. But I also don’t need to stress myself out to make sure I’ve had like a blowout and you know, full makeup and whatever it is people do because I clearly don’t do those things. So that’s my own personal, you know, lesson learned from a year of sitting in front of a camera broadcasting out to an audience in terms of things that I think we’ve done well, we’ve really treated it like every single week is a speaking opportunity. And so we do that preparation, we make sure that we thought ahead, what’s the topic? What’s the agenda? What are people going to learn from this show. And so we always have those three bullet points of here’s what you’re going to get if you tune into this show. So I think that we’ve done that consistently. And it’s worked really well to make sure that we stay structured and on topic, but that people know what they’re getting into and can decide, this is something that I want to tune into, because I’m going to learn the following things. So I think that we’ve done a really good job of making sure that it’s always educational, hopefully entertaining, and consistent. So those are sort of my big things.
Christopher Penn 4:19
One of the things I think has been really interesting it was we made the decision early on we’re going to just stream this pretty much anything if stream yard will connect to it, we’re just going to plug into it, you know, just just hit broadcast and and see what happens. And it really emphasizes the the importance of treating each channel as its own audience and not assuming that it’s the same people because it really isn’t. I want to share my screen here I was doing just a quick look in our YouTube Analytics. And so these, this is my personal YouTube channel, which in the beginning was obviously much larger. Our company has caught up pretty nicely and these are the top shows. So the top five For that aired on my channel number one how to do UX audit 457 views in the last year, email marketing deliverability was number two, the first show was number three, personal brand martec basics, Part one is number four, and then do Instagram hashtags improve engagement was was number five. Now if we contrast that, with what has aired on the Trust Insights channel, very different natural language processing, number one, 639 views, since it aired basic attribution 534, Data Studio 258, LinkedIn algorithm 111, and then YouTube’s algorithm 83. So it’s very interesting to see, these are not the same audiences. These are the the what the YouTube algorithm shows to viewers is not the same recommendations. And so it’s really important that yes, well, there’s only us doing our show, we are speaking to different groups of people, it’s kind of like, almost like, imagine being on stage at a conference. And you know, it’s being streamed. And in every conference room is a different crowd. Totally different people that goes through realtors in this room, there’s architects in this room, you’re like, Who am I speaking to? Well, this is really, I think, an important way of saying, you don’t know who your audience is, but you probably should some, they’re not saying this is only two YouTube channels. This is not LinkedIn, this is not Twitter, this is not Facebook, although nobody watches on Facebook. So I would say be be rigorous about looking at your data like we do, and saying, okay, is the audience different is what they want different? Like so this was, to me, this would say like this a lot of very algorithm, heavy stuff in the top five on Trust Insights YouTube channel. So, you know, if we were making content for that channel, specifically would say maybe we need to do more content on that. Whereas when you look, we go back when we look at what’s on my channel, you know, email is, is up there personal brand, Instagram, you know, so it’s, it’s less around one specific topic, which I think is really fascinating. Because I know personally, I’ve tried to focus more of my content on the data science and AI stuff, and yet, the company channel has more interested in that.
Katie Robbert 7:19
Which makes sense, it’s what we do. Um, you know, this says to me that, you know, we have an audience that’s really interested in learning more about SEO, specifically, more about, you know, the Google Marketing Platform, those are things that for us, yeah, let’s we can double down on that and create more content. You know, I was just looking at our data yesterday, and the self report data that we collect from people who fill out one of our forms. You know, we ask the same question every single time, you know, what are you struggling with? Or what are what are your biggest challenges, and it’s always useful analysis, always useful analysis, that is the that has been the number one challenge for the past two and a half years, followed by data collection. And so if we can learn from what we’ve done over the past year, in terms of what people are engaging with, and what people are watching from, That, to me should be a fairly easy, you know, next step of like, Okay, how do we focus more of SEO and Google Marketing Platform, and really make sure we’re teaching people about developing useful insights and data collection, like that, to me is sort of a no brainer. So that’ll be the focus of our next, you know, quarters worth of shows.
Christopher Penn 8:43
Exactly. I think the other thing we could take from these charts is, if we’re looking for topics to pitch to conferences and things we can take what we’ve learned from our live stream, and say, okay, you know, we can show you really good quantitative evidence that people want more on attribution modeling and Google Analytics more, I mean, you know, that qualitatively as well, but maybe a session on how does LinkedIn work? It’s done. That’s a relatively recent show. And it’s number four in our in our playlist. That’s pretty interesting. So I think one of the lessons, you know, the meta lessons I’ve taken from the livestream, aside from the fact that you’re right, we are on stage we are doing a webinar effectively every week is just the difference between a webinar and a live stream, is that one asks for you to fill out a form first, and that’s really it. Snow depends otherwise. We we’ve been doing this reduces a lot. And it’s, I find that when I’m talking to people, or when like somebody emailed me early to say, Hey, I’m not going to go make a talk coming up, you know, do you have any materials from like, I just point them to one of the shows on our channel and say, Hey, you just go watch this live stream?
Katie Robbert 9:47
Yeah. I think what I like about, you know, what we’ve done with the live stream is that it’s helped us retain that muscle for webinars and public speaking and so the same amount of prep goes into, you know, choosing these topics that go would go into doing a webinar, maybe we don’t have a full slide deck. And so the difference here is it needs to be more conversational and inclusive of, you know, the people representing the information. And so that brings me to John. So John, you are often the bad example that we use in the, in the live stream, you know, and, you know, we pick on you a lot in terms of like, hey, John, you have to do this, but I feel like, you know, the balance of the three of us, you know, I asked, you know, all of the pretend I’m new to this, you know, Chris, you do the majority of the presenting of the information. And, John, you bring that third perspective as the person who’s even a little bit more farther removed, but you understand all the technical stuff. So what are some of your lessons learned? or what have you enjoyed over the past year, aside from us just consistently picking on you,
John Wall 10:58
right, from a massive to do list? Now, the thing is, is that I do reflect just the average, you know, VP marketing, or somebody that’s in that marketing slot of having to get all this stuff done and not enough to do you know, it’s that the position is overwhelming. It’s not that I am an idiot, those two are independent of each other. Yeah, having an eye for, okay, here’s all the here’s all the concepts and theories. But here’s where it all meets the road, and how you actually get that over the finish line. So you’re bringing in some business and your customers are happier. That’s just a huge, ugly mess. And yeah, a huge part of what we do here is we’re always introducing concepts, concepts and topics, that, you know, marketing managers and marketing ops people need to know and understand. And so it’s our really our introduction to just their world, you know, if they just have some simple questions about a few things going on, or thinking about doing something new, they come across this content that we’ve got out there, and you totally nailed it, Katie is that, you know, normally it would have been that we would meet them at a martec show, or it inbound or it, marketing props or whatever. And we’d be doing a session on here’s how you do this thing. But over the past two years, while that’s all vanished and gone away, we can actually bring it to the rest of the world, which is a mixed bag, we can, it’s much more convenient and simpler for everyone, which, you know, on one hand is great. But on the other hand, it’s you can always say, well go watch those videos tomorrow, and you never do. And then of course, there’s this whole grab bag of lunatics who have also managed to shop that would normally be refused entrance at martec, or, you know, inbound, but they’re on the internet, more than happy to chime in on our chat. And, you know, thank God for stream yard and our ability to block people and things like that. But, you know, it all works, which is great. So, yeah, it’s, you know, it’s been a great year. And I definitely have to echo what you guys have just exercising that muscle of presenting and talking and explaining and learning. And it is cool. I think it’s more interactive, actually. And I’ve talked to a bunch of people that have echoed the similar thing of, you know, yeah, it is kind of rough having these huge zoom sessions and things like that, but you actually do get more interactivity, you know, when, like, if I was at dreamforce, in front of 500, people, I might get four or five questions and a 40 minute session. But if you’re doing an interactive zoom, or a session like this, like, we can chat with six, or seven or eight people at the same time, and field their questions and get, you know, if we really liked them, we could even put their face up on the screen, so you could see them and hear from them also, which, you know, we usually discourage, but it can be more interactive, and you can actually learn more and get more done. So it’s, yeah, I think we’ve just kind of made the best of what the world’s thrown us over the past couple of years. And it’s, you know, it’s created something fun and interesting, hopefully,
Katie Robbert 13:49
I think it’s definitely done. It’s helped us create additional content that we wouldn’t have otherwise had the bandwidth to create. And so one of the easiest things, at least for us, has been to just, you know, set up a camera and record a video and talk about the things that we know. And the way in which we process content is we have the video, then we can, you know, take the transcript and turn it into a blog post or other content. And I think that it’s that’s worked really well for us in terms of scaling, because it’s an extra piece, an extra couple of pieces of content that we then have that help us talk about the things we know, but also demonstrate how we solve problems. And I think that it’s also helped us, you know, test out a few ideas that we’ve had that, you know, maybe they don’t work, maybe it doesn’t have legs underneath it, maybe there wasn’t a so what to it, but this is sort of our safe, you know, almost like an r&d space, where the three of us can get together and with an audience, test these ideas, Chris, I remember we were doing This not too long ago with some sort of analysis, it was the Twitter analysis that you were testing out. And, you know, we were we actually based the show around, you know, solutions in search of a problem, which is a very common thing that a lot of companies run into. And so I, I like to that we kind of went really meta with it. And we’re able to say, like, we’re doing the same thing, let us do it in real time and show you what that looks like. And maybe we’re not going to have a positive result. But we’re okay with that. Because we’ll learn from it.
Christopher Penn 15:34
Yeah, it’s definitely one of those things were having the testbed is very useful. Again, you can look in the data and say, Okay, what, what landed with people, you know, and there was there’s some shows like The our dark data mining show that didn’t land with anybody, I guess not the top listed anything, it was one of the shows like, nobody cares. And I think that’s, that’s useful information for us. For our for content marketing, or otherwise to to say, like, yeah, this is a topic that if people cared about it, we would get would have more views. And that’s, that’s just the the easiest way to put it, if we upload, you know, captions and things so that so it’s searchable and findable in YouTube and stuff. And we we know that the YouTube recommendation engine looks at all that stuff and and what people are searching for. So all we’ve got to do is say, Okay, what is getting eyeballs? And is that something we can do more with? Or is it something that Yeah, there’s a whole, you know, looking at the the analyzing content curation for your personal brand, but that didn’t that didn’t do particularly well. Right. Okay, maybe we don’t need to spend a whole lot of time on that. So yeah, it has been a very useful, I think exercise to see what we can talk about coherently for at least 30 to 40 minutes a week. And where does it go with the audience in particularly, one of the things that we don’t have the ability to keep track of, but hopefully will someday, is the amount of interaction we get per show. Because even if the show doesn’t get a ton of, say, views after watching, if that was a show where there’s a lot of commentary, a lot of people asking questions, that would be something good to know, like, this is a topic that many people aren’t searching for, because they don’t even have the words to search for it. They don’t even know what to ask. But like last week, we did postmaster tools. There was a lot of chat on it, because people were like, Oh, right, don’t even know what these words mean.
Katie Robbert 17:27
Well, and you know, there’s an episode that sticks out to me. And it’s the episode that John and i did where John was talking about basically how to start a podcast and it in terms of live audience, it’s still one of our highest watched live. And I’m saying that anecdotally, because, you know, as we’re recording and broadcasting, I’m trying to pay attention to the metrics, because unfortunately, with the software, those metrics disappear afterwards, there’s no reporting. But that one, that’s one that stuck out to me if there was a lot of questions, and there was a lot of people who tuned in live. Now, the flip side of that is, Trust Insights is not set up to teach people how to start a podcast. So is that an opportunity for marketing over coffee to create some kind of a masterclass? I don’t know, maybe John, I’m adding more stuff to your list. I couldn’t get through one episode without us making your to do list longer. It wouldn’t be the so what show if we did that, but, you know, I think that we’re always trying to look at the data coming in to see where does it fit into the grand scheme of what TrustInsights.ai does, because if we’re being completely truthfully, you know, honest with ourselves, this is a sales tool as well, it’s for us to demonstrate what it is that we do and what we know, and to establish credibility in those areas, areas of things that we want people to buy services from us for. And so, you know, we’ll branch out and cover things that we don’t typically offer services for as that r&d space to test. And we’ll see, you know, okay, there’s no interest in this or a lot of people interested in this. And you know, as John, as you know, our head of business development gets questions from potential customers like, Hey, what do you guys know about this? He can similar to what you were saying, Chris, just pull up an episode. And say, here, watch this, you know, we talked about it for you know, 20 minutes if you want to watch that far in, you know, here we can demonstrate what we know about that topic. And you know, we can answer those questions that people have demonstrating our capabilities.
John Wall 19:42
You know, it’s funny one thing that came to me from the chart Chris had just shown about CX being so huge, I was surprised to see that dominating so much. And the thing that goes straight to me with that, then is we should just stop calling it digital customer journey like it should be UX journey or UX map or something like that. Because We have to train people what digital customer journey is, because that’s not a any kind of industry phrase. But obviously CX just has gravity on its own. So we should just let you know move to take advantage of that. And I think that is one thing about the show too, as I was talking about classic events, is we have no problem coming up on here and being like, Oh, my God, this is a total failure here, you know, this has not worked at all. And that’s totally not what you get, you know, when you go to an event, it’s always a cherry pick case study, that’s going to be perfect. And, you know, you would think that, you get the wrong idea of marketing, which is you’ve got to put tons of content out there all the time and stuff fails, and it gets ugly. But that’s how you, you know, move ahead and make progress.
Katie Robbert 20:41
I agree with that. I think that one of the things I really like, not just about this show, but about, you know, our organization in general is that we’re not afraid of failing. We’re not afraid of things that don’t work, because we’re always learning from it. And I think being the people to show those things to the rest of our audience, like, hey, not everything that we do works out perfectly either helps people get Oh, it’s okay to fail. It’s okay to not get it right, the first, second or even third time, as long as I’m continuing to learn from it, and try to improve upon it. And you’re absolutely right, John, an event planner is not going to bring you on as a speaker. If you’re like, yeah, I’m going to show six out of seven case studies where things went really poorly. But there has to be a space where that happens. And I would like to think that we have created a bit of that space with our live stream to be like, you know what, sometimes we really just shift the balance on that thing. Like, it just didn’t work. But that’s okay. Because here’s what we learned from it. And here’s what we’re going to try differently.
John Wall 21:49
Yeah, no, that’s where it depends come from. Hi, hey, you know, it’s so funny. Another thing, though, is this setup and medium is fantastic. For every week, we can just roll something out, because I was thinking, one thing, viewers and people that go to events totally miss out on is the rest of the infrastructure. Normally, for a show, it’s, there’ll be a day of fighting over travel, there’ll be a day of actually doing the travel, you’ll be on site, you know, and then there’s a day cleanup and getting home, there’s like four days that get burned in a pile, to do a session like this. Whereas us being able to just, you know, on Monday to whiteboard the topics and do some research and get things ready for Thursday, you’re just getting pure content without you know, we’re able to crank out three, four times as much without having to go through all the going through the airport and all the foolishness that goes with that.
Katie Robbert 22:42
Yeah, I’ve, I’ve been a fan of that.
Christopher Penn 22:45
Speaking of events, one of the things that that you just made me think of is with enough shows under our belt, or collective belts, on all these different topics, we could actually cluster them together by topic and say like, here’s a half day Trust Insights conference, right? And it’s these five episodes of so what on, you know, the email marketing? Yep. So the attribution episodes of the Google Analytics four episodes, and packaging that up for people, I mean, you know, we’ve said many times one of our largest failings is our failure to promote ourselves well, and our failure to to make things easy for people to just pick up, you know, expressions put handles on things they can pick up and carried away, you know, looking at the topics again, we’ve we’ve done personal branding, and martec. and stuff, you know, so we literally have enough videos, to have a personal brand, half day conference, we have probably a full day conference of Google Analytics stuff that we’ve just done naturally. And so as folks who are thinking about doing your own live stream, if you do take the time to do the planning and stuff, then you can actually build out, you know, a conference for yourself of just you, you know, you so you don’t have to have get sponsors involved and no sales sessions and all that stuff. You don’t have to, you know, rent expensive conference software, you can literally hand someone a YouTube playlist. So here is the your company’s conference on this topic. Make it easy for people. And in turn, you can see like, does the topic overall resume maybe, you know, when I look again, at some of the trends that we’re looking at some of the shows on on Google Analytics, like the three easy wins show didn’t do as well. Now, is it was it just timeliness? Did we just missed the boat on that? Or was there something else happening? You know, maybe there’s a big conference happening the same time, but if we bundled that together with all the other shows? Would we see that? Actually, yes, it is. So I started doing really well, because it’s part of the Google Analytics four package.
Katie Robbert 24:41
Are you able to share a playlist link on social media versus just a video? Oh, yeah, for sure. All right, Shawn, write that down.
John Wall 24:51
Yeah, exactly. Well, no, the thing I was thinking of the way to go with that is, we really need to rip off the whole Seth Godin model. Have you set up a discord group? It’s like, okay, for $295, you get into the group, and it’s just each page is one of the videos. But the key is you’ve got a discussion group in there, and you say, okay, for the next two weeks, when you have questions and comments, you know, there’s the whole group is going to be in there learning from each other, and we will stop and to answer questions, and keep things going. And so you timebox that you create scarcity, you lock out the rest of the world. And yeah, you know, he’s just printing money, he like looks down upon us from his mountain fortress. So obviously, that, you know, that thing is working. Right. So, yeah, set up Discord server, I got that on my list.
Katie Robbert 25:39
You know, so we’ve been talking a lot about the things that we’ve done well, and, you know, in order to be a us and be authentic, you know, we would be remiss if we didn’t talk about the things that haven’t gone. Well. So we’ve talked a little bit about some of the episodes that maybe didn’t land as well, I think, you know, Chris, you just touched upon this, one of the things we don’t do well, especially for this show is promote ourselves, or, you know, promote it after the fact. And so some of that is due to, it’s just not, you know, it doesn’t come naturally to any of us, even though we’re marketers, we’re not true, tried and true marketers. We’re all sort of, like accidental marketers. And I think also, it’s partly, you know, resources, you know, that you’re looking at the entire company. And so, it just tends to be a lower priority for us. But I think, you know, we don’t do enough reflecting on the things that we do, you know, separately, and so all the different pieces of content, the shows, but Chris, you just sort of hit upon, like, if we bundle them together, maybe that’s a thing, you know, and so that’s something that I think that we could do a better job of, you know, something else we don’t do a great job of is, you know, forward thinking in terms of the types of shows that we want to do. And so you know, yes, every week, we play out the topic, we get one week ahead of it, so that we can promote it on social media. But we have all of these tools that we tell our clients about in terms of keyword research, predictive forecasting, and, again, due to, you know, call it laziness, call it lack of time, call it bandwidth. We haven’t used those tools ourselves. And so Chris, when you were just talking about, you know, a specific Google Analytics episode, I can guarantee we didn’t use our own forecasting tools to plan the timing of it. We just said, hey, let’s cover this topic. So those that’s something that I feel like we should get more disciplined about in terms of planning out our shows.
Christopher Penn 27:41
It’s interesting, you know, I like that you mentioned the laziness in there, I was watching a thing on Instagram recently, Gary Vaynerchuk, was talking about different personality attributes. And he actually had a really, I think, insightful thing to say, but lazy. He says laziness is a good thing. Laziness tells you when you know you are bad at something, or when you know, that you don’t enjoy doing something, right? You get laser like, Yeah, because if you really liked it, you can love doing it. Keep doing it like that, like all the time, like, how, like how I feel about email newsletters, if I could send an email newsletter every day, I would, because I love doing email marketing that much. We don’t have we, it’s not a priority to do that. But compare that to, oh, should I you know, we organize our YouTube channel into playlists and you know, bundle things up and you know, put a post on YouTube and, and do all the things that a good youtuber would do make your end cards and all this stuff. I don’t like doing it. I you know, it’s it’s just not my thing. I look at someone you know, like violet or Landy or first 211 or any of these, you know, the the big musical acts and stuff that are on YouTube. And the effort and the energy and the resources they put into promoting the tech of that channel is that’s something that they love their audiences too, but they clearly put time and effort into their craft for that. And it shows it shows that they are at but on the flip side, they have absolutely no content marketing, you know, they have no email marketing and stuff like that. So you can see what they know they either don’t know or aren’t good at or don’t enjoy doing. So. I think that’s a good indicator, you know, as a useful meta takeaway from this is when you feel like you’re procrastinating something. Yeah. ask why. Like, what is it about that thing? Like Yep, I’m gonna do it.
Katie Robbert 29:25
So the reason I’m procrastinating on getting our new website done is because it’s not my jam.
Christopher Penn 29:31
Yeah, it’s not your jam. It’s not something that you know it when you something is your jam, you feel confident doing it like okay, just get away. You know, y’all you sit down we’re gonna do this thing like you’re watching you run a meeting, for example. You have absolutely zero doubt in your mind how to make that meeting happen and get all the people to behave, right there’s there’s not nothing putting it, you’re putting it off. So it comes down to what is it that you’re good at and so when we talk about the Live stream and the things that we don’t do well, that’s the easiest indicator, like, Oh, I forgot to, you know, put up this blog post, I forgot to do this like, Okay, well, that’s clearly then says that’s, that’s not an area of strength.
Katie Robbert 30:13
It makes sense. And, you know, I think that, you know, we’re only limited by ourselves at this point. And you know, so obviously, we’re trying to grow the company and bring on other staff members. But until we do that, we, the three of us kind of just have to suck it up and do the thing. Um, alright, so John, your to do list is going to get longer,
John Wall 30:33
I know more stuff. But that is the throttle right there as you do stuff, that only has to be good enough. Because, yeah, if you look at like Mr. Beast, or some of these YouTube accounts that, you know, there’s a person whose full time job is to optimize thumbnails, you know, like, that’s all they do with their whole life. And we actually have some clients. And this is another great plug is that our clients always come first. That’s the reason why this stuff all sucks is because we’re making our clients happy. So you know, you need to, if you want higher quality stuff, just come talk to us. But you do the best with what you’ve got. And thankfully, the tools have, you know, improved so much that we can get our stuff out there without having to, you know, work because this is something I just learned so early in my career is the great thing with marketing is there’s never a shortage of stuff to do, you can always come up with a list of 20 things you should be doing today that could drive the business. And that list is infinite. So if you only crossed five or seven off your list today, well, don’t let that keep you up at late at night, because there’s 20 other pages of stuff that could easily be added to that.
Katie Robbert 31:40
No, that’s that’s absolutely true. You know, I will say a couple of things that we have started doing within the past few months that have been working. So Chris, you have started including meeting invites, or calendar invites to the live stream in the newsletter, and you’re seeing people take advantage of that. And so it’s a one click way for people to just put it on their calendar for that week for whatever that topic is. And John, you’ve been using the live stream as your r&d space for SMS advertising and text messaging advertising. And so I would love to hear from both of you how those things are going. And if you think that we’ll continue doing that into the future.
John Wall 32:24
Yeah, Chris, how did you want to lead with the calendar that I hadn’t even? I didn’t know it’s in the newsletter. It’s already on my calendar. So
Katie Robbert 32:31
Well, yeah, you don’t count. It’s already on your calendar. You have to be here.
Christopher Penn 32:35
Yeah, exactly, no. But on average, the those calendar at least get around 15 to 20 clicks a week, right. So people clicking on one of those links is, you know, added to Google Calendar, Outlook calendar, your office 365 calendar. And it’s a relatively inexpensive, like, it does take somebody you know, about a two to five minutes a week to put those links together. So that it functions as an auto invite, but it’s useful. And, again, it’s one of those things that you can use to draw attention. Even just an email design, like, Hey, here’s this thing, here’s three bullets. Oh, it was, oh, ad is my calendar. Okay, that’s something that’s useful. What we do see perform much better, is actually getting people to the videos, either on YouTube or in the blog post, post show, you know, so there may be 15 to 20 people watch during the show, but then, you know, obviously, hundreds of people watching after the show is aired. So one of the things to keep in mind is that unless you have a compelling business reason to have content vanish after it’s aired, treat it like a regular YouTube video as well, you know, promoted the same, the URL is the same. Obviously, Facebook is your jam, if that’s your platform do that there. I’ve seen we’ve seen good interaction with LinkedIn. But we have not seen the you know, the post event videos do well at all. It’s like once it passes out a feed, it’s it’s gone from memory, whereas YouTube obviously shows up in search. So those calendar invites are good for the appointment media side of things. But at least for us, in our experience, the real the real audiences after the after the show’s over.
John Wall 34:13
The the text front has just been fascinating. I’ve been loving it. I mean, the one thing with the text, though, it’s kind of easy fishing, you know, because those are the most engaged people, these are people that do want to actually get a text message from us and hear about stuff real time. So those are kind of the best fans, the most passionate fans. And it really doesn’t take a lot of work to get them, you know, involved in it because they want to hear about it. The real challenge, I think, is getting the folks that are a lot earlier in the cycle, you know, that have never heard about us or the show, getting them to check out a new show and able to grow things. Whereas Yeah, text is just kind of an extension of the email address. You know, I think you can definitely anybody you have in your email house list. You give them the option to sign up via via text and get text messages and you’re just going to get that 10% that loves everything you do are going to be the people that are And then the only other thing that an interesting learning from all that is how they’ve applied some machine learning to the tool now, which has been really fascinating and that, you know, with email, you do a blast, and you get these 35 emails in, and now you have to go through your inbox. Hopefully, it’s at least getting the bounces out, and you’re just answering, you know, ham and no spam. But the text message platform will group them it intelligently groups them. So for example, I send out a text and say, Hey, the job was 75 t earbuds are on sale this week, you know, we’ve talked about them on the show, everybody loves them. You know, if I get four or five responses back of Where can I find them? Or where’s the link? Or what’s the discount code, it will actually bundle those together and say, hey, these six text messages are all, you know, send me the link, so I can get that. And I can answer the one and it goes back to the six. So that’s really a one to one marketing thing of, you know, I’m not spamming an answer back. I’m giving the individuals that want that stuff back. But it’s been optimized for me so that I don’t have to send six messages, I can just do it at once. So yeah, and then when you add in all the weird stuff going on with email, now, and over the next couple of months, with opens and clicks and losing, tracking over there, yeah, text is just a really great place to be the challenge with is, you know, our marketers going to ruin it again, are you going to be getting 65 texts a day and just throwing your phone in the trash, because you just can’t take it anymore? That remains to be seen?
Katie Robbert 36:30
That’s a solid point. And I hope not. You know, it’s enough that we’re getting all of these spam, phone calls now to start getting the spam text would be just that much worse. Um, you know, so Chris, you were mentioning, you know, the content after the show. So one of the things that we’ve done is create a very simple blog template that, you know, I have it literally sitting up on my computer in BB edit, where every week, just copy the template right into WordPress, and then change a couple of links, and maybe not even 10 minutes, depending on how slow you’re moving that morning, the post is up. And so the post is already shareable, it’s already ready for people to consume the information. And so I would say, you know, if you’re trying to recreate or write a whole new fresh post, right after you’ve done some sort of like a live stream or video, give yourself a break, and maybe just create a super simple template to just plug the link into and let the video be the content, you don’t have to recreate it in this blog template. Because if you’re posting the transcription from the video, the content is already there. So I, I made the conscious decision to give myself a break and keep the template really straightforward. And it’s the same every single week, it introduces like, here’s the live stream here, each where you can watch it. Here’s the topic we covered this week. Here’s the video. Here’s the three learning takeaways, which we had planned from the week before. And here’s what’s coming up next week. And then the transcripts, super straightforward. It takes maybe 10 minutes to put together every single week. And then that’s it. It’s done. It’s out there. Yeah.
Christopher Penn 38:15
All right, John, I was
John Wall 38:17
just say, so many people fail to close the loop like that, like, that’s, you just have to do that.
Christopher Penn 38:22
Yeah. You know, on the topic of when we, if we were to start over today, having those those processes in place would be I think, save us a lot of headache. You know, if we were starting up a new show, okay, we need to have this template, we need to have the process we need to have, you know, the audio file uploaded to otter, for transcription. After the show, though, all those little things that just go in the cookbook over time. That’s the biggest thing starting over is just take the cookbook of stuff, you know, it works and move it on, move it into a lot of the early stuff of this show came from the Saturday night show that I used to do, like, you know, how do you stream those things and stuff. So now it’s it’s just continuing to evolve. Lessons learned over the years.
Katie Robbert 39:07
I totally forgot that you used to do that Saturday Night Show
John Wall 39:10
data party? Yep, that’s right.
Katie Robbert 39:15
Well, so as we’re wrapping up this, you know, one year anniversary of the live stream, I’ll guess I’ll sort of, you know, ask this very broad open ended question of a year from now, what do you hope we’ve been able to do with this show? And I’ll ask that question to both of you. And I will also take a minute to think about that. But what do you hope in the next year, not in the you know, what happens in the world but just, you know, constrained down to this show? What do you hope that we can do with this show in the next year for Trust Insights?
Christopher Penn 39:49
I think it would be interesting, it would be a dynamic change, I think and not all the time, but I think be interesting to occasionally have a guest on you know, like a Hot Seat shellac. Okay, oh, come on onto the show, bring your website or your Data Studio dashboard, or your your latest email marketing. And we play you know, like a game show, just like what can we do to improve this thing? So like, Oh gosh, what was this cooking show? It’s like that it’s sort of a hotseat show, we just disassemble some of these things as you critique it live. I think something like that would be very interesting to do. We’ve, we’ve seen it done at conferences, it goes over usually very well, because you can get a lot of learnings out of it. And can you know, it’s creates that reactive environment where, oh, that color on the websites terrible or Wow, that call to action? You can’t use on a mobile device? Little things like that. But it will be fun. I would love to see that happening in the next year.
John Wall 40:48
Yeah, that would be interesting. Well, I
Katie Robbert 40:50
think we would need to be careful to make sure we keep it as a learning and not as someone who’s just coming on to be promotional. So I think that that’s where, for me, that’s where I would draw the line of like, we’re happy to help you when you get some free work done. But it can’t just be you plugging your book every few seconds. Like, Oh, no, you’re going to get punished. Yeah, John gets enough of that all day long.
John Wall 41:12
I know, I thought you were gonna say we don’t want people just to come on to get pummeled. That’s also part of it. But it’s, you know, if that URL is live, buddy, you better get with it. Because you’re already you’re already taking a beating. Yeah, as far as the next year, I just, you know, it’s all about more reach and better audience, you know, I would love to make sure that we’re meeting the needs of what people want to hear. And so as a result, more people want to get involved in the community gets more active, because yeah, it’s just amazing. Some of the stuff we’ve done, like over in the slack group of being able to have conversations about the you know, remember, I was just talking this morning, we’re talking about how h3 tags are getting promoted on blog posts to the title. And it’s, you know, it’s just some crazy stuff that Google’s doing, and to have a place where you can go and talk about what’s going on and, and figure out where to go next. That’s just you can’t put a price tag on that, really, that’s what kind of fuels everything and gives everybody a chance to succeed. So yeah, that’s where I hope we can get to in the next 12 months.
Christopher Penn 42:10
How about you, Katie?
Katie Robbert 42:15
I want us to stay consistent, and continue to be able to produce this show on a weekly basis. I like the cadence of it, I think that it’s, you know, just enough of the three of us getting together to problem solve, I want to make sure that we keep it a problem solving show. So that, you know, we’re still getting to the so what like, why does someone care about the show, but then I want to, you know, I want us to, you know, Chris, as you were just saying, you know, in terms of what we would do different, I want us to be able to tighten up those processes around being able to promote ourselves a little bit better. It’s something we were talking about in a different context, but related, you know, we know what we do is valuable, where we struggle is to explain it to people in such a way that they understand it. And I feel like this show is a great opportunity for that. So if we take even more of the stuff that we think is valuable to our customers and really dissect it, maybe even bring someone on to be that, you know, customer live person to ask those questions. I think that we would only be doing ourselves in our audience a benefit to really break it down to tangible actionable things of what do I do with, you know, a Markov chain attribution analysis? Well, first of all, what the hell is it? And second, why do I need it? So using this platform to really dig into, you know, breaking it down to more simplistic terms.
Christopher Penn 43:44
Alright, well, thank you for watching. Whether this is your first episode or the 50th episode you’ve enjoyed, if so, what? Stay tuned, we’re gonna be trying all sorts of new stuff in the future. If you haven’t had a chance, go hop on over the slack group. You’ll see a URL for it a little bit. And we’ll catch you next week. So take care everyone. Thanks for watching today. Be sure to subscribe to our show wherever you’re watching it. For more resources. And to learn more, check out the Trust Insights podcast at Trust insights.ai slash ti podcast, and a weekly email newsletter at Trust insights.ai slash newsletter. got questions about what you saw on today’s episode. Join our free analytics for markers slack group at Trust insights.ai slash analytics for marketers. See you next time.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
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Trust Insights (trustinsights.ai) is one of the world's leading management consulting firms in artificial intelligence/AI, especially in the use of generative AI and AI in marketing. Trust Insights provides custom AI consultation, training, education, implementation, and deployment of classical regression AI, classification AI, and generative AI, especially large language models such as ChatGPT's GPT-4-omni, Google Gemini, and Anthropic Claude. Trust Insights provides analytics consulting, data science consulting, and AI consulting.
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